4 Steps to Overcoming Seasonal Staffing Demands

It’s that time of year again–packed shopping centres, overflowing beer gardens and booked-out function centres. If you’re in the retail, hospitality or events industries, you’re likely already swimming in rostering issues and piles of CVs, with staffing up to serve increasing customer numbers and fulfilling functions your number one priority.

To lessen the stress of this year’s peak season, optimise your productivity, and help you keep your costs-to-serve at a minimum, here are 4 simple steps to ensure your seasonal hiring is as effective and efficient as possible.

Step 1: Know how much extra help you need

Amazon is hiring 120,000 additional workers for the holiday season, a testament to just how important having sufficient seasonal staff is to meeting customer needs. Consider how many staff you had last year, evaluate whether it was successful, and factor in any customer growth over the past 12 months.

Think about the type of roles you’ll need to recruit for. For example hospitality and retail businesses will immediately think of additional bar or floor staff, but may not consider the need for additional security or admin. An influx of customers means higher liability for theft. If you’re in need of hard-to-find roles, such as chefs, the earlier you start the search, the better.

Step 2: Finding staff quickly and easily to ensure positive return

Given your seasonal staff will likely be with your business for a short period of time, the cost it incurs to recruit and onboard through traditional means (e.g. posting ads on jobs boards) will often outweigh the return.

Consider this – once you’ve found several candidates, you’ll have to go through the recruitment process. This includes CV screening, interviewing and reference checking. Doing all of this for someone who may only work for you three days a week for two months mightn’t be the best way to spend your time. Thus, it’s crucial that you leverage a solution that strips back time and cost.

Step 3: Choosing the right staff

Reliability and availability are the most important qualities of a seasonal worker. You can’t afford to be short-staffed at this time of year, and you can’t afford to not maintain standards of customer service.

During the interview process, be sure to ask them situational questions such as, “Tell me about a time you missed a shift. How did you handle it?” or “Tell me about a time you dealt with an irritated customer.” These types of questions can give you a good idea about the candidate’s character and if they’ll be a good teammate in the busiest and most stressful time of year.

Step 4: Leverage on-demand technology

With on-demand staffing platforms you can accomplish all of these steps in one cost-effective and efficient way. On a platform like Sidekicker, you can post a request for staff in minutes, and notify thousands of local, pre-screened and qualified staff.. Due to the transparent nature of the platform, you can also view all applicants’ profiles and reviews, empowering you to choose the best people for your business.

Given Sidekicker is an all-in-one online platform, you also don’t have to worry about admin and paperwork, as everything–from Super to payment– all taken care of by Sidekicker. No CV screening or extensive training required.